While many animals have mastered the ability to enter torpor, it’s something that eludes us humans. Curiously, despite decades of research, human hibernation remains among the few questions that still belong to both science and science fiction. Is there something special about our nature that prevents us from hibernating? Will we ever know what it is like to hibernate? Clearly, being in torpor and being outside of it corresponds to states that are worlds apart. In our daily life, we are trapped within a very narrow range of physiological parameters, and rarely venture into other dimensions of existence, apart from sleep. This does not suggest, though, that this is all we have. On the contrary, humans have always been remarkably creative and imaginative with respect to changing their state of body and state of mind, for example by taking mind-altering drugs, entering a state of deep meditation, or even willingly changing metabolic rates. While we could possibly find a way to enter hibernation or a similar state, we do not have an immediate or urgent need to do so, as we have developed, and perfected, other ways to deal with adversities. We can make fire and electricity, can build shelters and manufacture warm clothing, get food easily, and spend tremendous amounts of energy derived from outside sources to preserve our own limited supply. Paradoxically, it appears that we are too smart and technologically advanced to hibernate – something other creatures we consider inferior just take for granted.
It’s no coincidence that at a time when pubs and alcohol consumption are on the decline, bakeries are appearing at a rate of knots. Amy Gastman, founder of plant-based bakery Crumb, believes the bakery boom is a byproduct of the cost of living crisis: “I think it’s a result of people perhaps not having the money to spend on ridiculously expensive restaurant meals but still wanting to treat themselves,” she tells me. “Indulging in a croissant or a cookie or whatever is like a little luxury. It feels indulgent but in a small way. I know a lot of people would feel comfortable paying £4 for a cookie but less likely to spend £150 on dinner.”
Ordinarily, I hate staying at someone’s house, but when Hugh and I visited his friend Mary in Maine we had no other choice. There weren’t any hotels on the small island where she lives in the summer, and she’d seemed so genuine when she extended her invitation that we really couldn’t refuse. Mary and Hugh went to college together a hundred thousand years ago, back when tuition was affordable and you could study things like acting without bankrupting yourself. Her auburn hair had turned mostly white since I’d last seen her, fifteen years earlier, and she wore it in an untidy bun.
In an age of divisiveness and bad news, it’s a book where a family finds their way back to each other. A dazzling debut — readers will be anxiously awaiting the sequel.
A welcome addition to the literary dance canon, “City of Night Birds” is most compelling when its interpersonal dramas test the novel’s central question: whether, as one character opines, “Love doesn’t set anyone free. Art does.”
Winton offers a salutary warning of the future that awaits us if we continue to ignore the climate crisis, and his book serves as a powerful call to action.
“If you are tempted to use such a phrase as just a cat,” the author warns early in his new memoir, “I can only hope that you read on and discover not only that she ruled her untamed world, but brought life-affirming purpose to my own.” Throughout the 352 pages of My Beloved Monster, Carr, an American crime writer and military historian who died earlier this year from cancer aged 68, sets out what may be the most effusive paean to cat love ever committed to paper.
For those who suffered through chemistry class convinced that the Periodic Table actually was a manual for alien tortures, Mark Miodownik has a belated, but welcome, antidote.
He makes the whole thing interesting. “It’s a Gas” is truth in advertising.
I sometimes think of mysticism – the name we give to ecstatic, transformative experiences of absorption into absolute reality or, if you will, into God – as the subject that fascinates where all others merely interest. And yet it denotes something singularly hard to talk or write about, indeed virtually defined by its ineffability. On Mysticism, the philosopher Simon Critchley’s stab at effing the ineffable, feels oddly timely. As he notes: “There is an awful lot of mysticism about. More than ever in recent years.” He doesn’t speculate, but the widespread interest may point to that metaphysical restlessness that wells up during periods of acute cultural change – the return of the transcendental to a reality system no longer adequate for the times.